Getting ready for a finance or legal internship interview

I know this is an important time for many students facing interviews for various financial and legal internship schemes. It can be a worrying time as you are trying to impress an interview panel in order to secure one of the very few opportunities to get useful and relevant summer work programmes with an investment bank or a leading UK law firm. I know from some emails I have received that this book is often used to help prepare for this process. This year I would like to advise you on using the book for this purpose. So the next couple of blogs are designed to help you!

1) If you have little knowledge of finance and economics the book can really help you get the basic knowledge. You should focus first on the introductions to each Topic. These are short overviews of most of the key corporate finance topics. They should easy to read and they will help you to get a quick overview of the subject. I would start with Topic 2 (Financial Institutions) and Topic 3 (Financial Markets). Once you have this framework covered you can work your way through them one by one.

2) The interviewers will expect you to know what the key terms mean. Use the glossary to understand things like LIBOR, FT-SE 100, repos, Bullish, Bearish etc.

3) The Merger and Acquisition topic is popular with the law firms. So make sure you read through this carefully and find out as much as possible from the FT on current deals.

I hope this helps...

All the best and good luck

Kevin